I recently bought an Amazon Kindle after a friend enthused about it. As a life-long bibliophile, I’ve always been sceptical of electronic book substitutes. Some of my books are three hundred years old and this physical longevity always persuaded me that paper books would never be supplanted by electronic interlopers. I like books, enjoy handling them, take much pleasure in their endless variety, but now I’m not so sure. I have to admit the Kindle changed my mind, or at least skewed it.
Reading the Kindle is very much like reading a book. The screen looks pretty similar to paper; it’s easy to read in a wide range of lighting and best of all, you can access hundreds of thousands of books through this one little device. But what I particularly like is the fact that I can buy huge numbers of classics for peanuts. There are disadvantages of course. Diagrams could be better and some Kindle books are not formatted as well as they could be, but that will change.
As for me, I’ve given away at least half of my books to charity. I use my Kindle for virtually all of my reading and I’ve even taken the DIY publishing plunge by publishing one of my own books ( The Pillbox ) in Kindle format. Where will it all end?
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